Easter Basket Buddies

I'm on a kick with old Easter pictures from my childhood, having gone through them recently to find one for yesterday's post about Easter bonnets. I needed an excuse to post another, so here it is: this is me with my older brother on Easter morning in 1963 (I'm almost 5). He and I are only 16 months apart, and we were always great buddies growing up. I think the two of us are looking pretty stylish in our Easter Sunday outfits. Note my lovely hat; see, it's true--in the early sixties, little girls pretty much always wore Easter bonnets for Mass on Easter morning. (By the way, my hair was as straight as a stick,;but it appears that my mother went overboard with the pink sponge rollers, trying to give me Shirley Temple curls.)

This picture amuses me, not only because of my hair-do, but because it looks like my brother is checking out my basket, cataloging the items in it to make sure that I didn't get so much as one more jelly bean than he did. There were 5 kids in my family, and everyone was always on the alert for lapses in fairness, particularly when it came to candy and treats. This must be common in big families, because when my own 5 boys were young, my husband and I often jokingly called them the "fairness police."

But having lots of sibling-buddies with whom to share life's joys--one of them being checking out each other's treat-filled baskets on Easter morning--is one of the greatest blessings in the world.